Welcome to Las Vegas! My name is Victor H. Royer, but everyone just calls me Vegas Vic. I was named after that famous neon sign in Downtown Las Vegas, that cowboy with the hat on top of the Pioneer Club, always waving his hand and beckoning to his long love, Sassy Sally, on the other side of the street. I will be writing a few articles for AccessVegas.com, so I hope you enjoy them.

Playing Internet Tournaments — Part 5 — Faster Play

Real world poker players, especially those used to land-based poker tournaments, tend to be comfortable in sitting around for many hours without actually playing any hands, because they understand that the real world poker tournaments are marathons that usually take many hours, and often many days to complete. As a result, they pace themselves differently compared to the world of the Internet poker tournament. Therefore, when they now find themselves sitting in front of their computer and playing on Internet poker tournament, they tend to be overwhelmed by the very nature of the game, and its accompanying speed. The Internet poker tournament is run by software that is very fast, and decisions come by very quickly, one after the other. There also no delays, such as players making the wrong bets, the wrong moves, playing out of turn, or any of the other distractions that can enter into consideration in the real world.

Everything is done in turn on the Internet, because the software will not allow anything else. You also have a multitude of pre-action buttons which you can use to select your action long before it becomes your turn to actually perform it. This makes everything go by a lot faster, and sometimes so fast that the players who have become familiar with land-based poker tournaments can easily find themselves overwhelmed simply by the speed in which they have to make their decisions, as well as the frequency with which such decisions will arrive. Although this is not always so, it is nevertheless somewhat of a poker culture shock, and I can attest to that from firsthand experience. I found that to be the case myself, and it took me quite a while to adjust to it. Therefore I can understand how there can also be of some other players who have first learned to play in the real world, and are only now entering the world of the Internet.

The second situation has to do with the number of players involved in such tournaments. Prior to 2003, even the World Series of Poker attracted less than 800 players, and did so only for the championship event held once a year. Of course, we all now know what happened in 2003 and 2004, as well as what happened with the WPT and WSOP televised tournaments, all of which contributed to suddenly vaulting poker tournaments to the forefront of worldwide media, and thus many thousands of viewers and players. Those championship events now have many thousands of players, and take many days to complete. But prior to this, even professional players familiar with regularly playing land-based poker tournaments, were usually expecting fields of somewhere around 200 or fewer players in most of these events in which they were playing at the time.

Consequently, when such players then entered the world of the Internet, and even now when most players are used to regular fields of around 500 players in just about all the tournaments being held, suddenly facing Internet fields of 800 players, 1000 players, 1500 players, or 2000 players, or more, seemed like a daunting task indeed.

The adjustment to this was significantly more difficult to players of my generation, because most of us experienced land-based tournaments with fields of only less than 200 players or so. And even now, when we are all faced with fields of several thousand players in the major tournament events, the fact still remains that the vast majority of the regular tournaments being held on a daily and weekly basis, including the circuit poker tournaments, usually don’t have many more than about 300 to 500 players each. This is still a lot less than the 800, or 1500, or more players that you regularly find in many of the Internet poker tournaments.

To adjust to this it first became necessary to realize that in the world of Internet poker everything will go by a lot faster, as I mentioned earlier. Once we were able to make that adjustment, players such as myself who first learned to play tournaments in the real world quickly realize and understood that the large fields of players in Internet poker tournaments are not really as daunting as they initially appeared. The first thing that is noticeable is that almost half of those fields usually disappear before the first hour is up. This has a lot to do with the next item, which I will discuss shortly.

By the end of the second hour, usually about two thirds of such large fields are already gone from the tournament. By the third hour, most such tournaments are down to less than 200 players. Now the tournament becomes manageable, and by the time you make it to the final table you have usually invested somewhere between four to five hours even with large fields of that many players, when that same tournament structure in the real-world — with that many players — would have taken about five days to play.

Once players of my generation were able to understand this, and become used to it, our transition to the world of the Internet poker tournaments became a lot easier, especially from the psychological perspective. We were now able to understand that playing on the Internet with that many players entering such tournaments is not a prospect of sitting in front of our computer for the next five to seven days, but is in fact something that can be accomplished in one afternoon. Believe me, this realization makes the transition from learning to play poker tournaments in the real world to those of the Internet a lot easier.

Victor H. Royer, known as Vegas Vic, is the author of 42 books. Mostly known for books, articles, and columns on casino games and gambling, he is also the author of New Casino Slots, Great Gamblers: True Stories and Amazing Facts, The Great American Joke Book, as well as his works of Fiction, which include: Another Day, and the Western: Riders on the Wind. Versatile and multitalented, Royer is the creator, producer, and host of the Web-TV show Great Casino Slots, now showing at www.LasVegasLiveTV.com. He also composes music and performs under the names Glenn Diamond, Pappy Jones, Hans Dorfmann, and Miguel Armandaiz. For more information, please visit him at www.MoreCasinoDeals.com and www.GamingAuthor.com. Sign up for the Insider Advantage Newsletter at: http://www.accessvegas.com/membership

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